So What On My Site Is Breaking The Google Guidelines?
-
I have a site that I'm trying to rank for the Keyword "Jigsaw Puzzles"
I was originally ranked around #60 or something around there and then all of a sudden my site stopped ranking for that keyword. (My other keyword rankings stayed)
Contacted Google via the site reconsideration and got the general response...
So I went through and deleted as many links as I could find that I thought Google may not have liked... heck, I even removed links that I don't think I should have JUST so I could have this fixed.
I responded with a list of all links I removed and also any links that I've tried to remove, but couldn't for whatever reasons.
They are STILL saying my website is breaking the Google guidelines... mainly around links.
Can anyone take a peek at my site and see if there's anything on the site that may be breaking the guidelines? (because I can't)
Website in question: http://www.yourjigsawpuzzles.co.uk
UPDATE:
Just to let everyone know that after multiple reconsideration requests, this penalty has been removed.
They stated it was a manual penalty.
I tried removing numerous different types of links but they kept saying no, it's still breaking rules.
It wasn't until I removed some website directory links that they removed this manual penalty.
Thought it would be interesting for some of you guys.
-
Great new Rhys!
-
Just to let everyone know that after multiple reconsideration requests, this penalty has been removed.
They stated it was a manual penalty.
I tried removing numerous different types of links but they kept saying no, it's still breaking rules.
It wasn't until I removed some website directory links that they removed this manual penalty.
Thought it would be interesting for some of you guys.
-
Potentially quicker to rank well if you built back up on a fresh domain with no poor history, but that being said, whose not to know if Google have methods in place to identify if domain owners do this - potentially via comparing content, code and copy. You might end up redoing everything on your website just to be safe.
Sticking with the same domain just means that you have to build a relatively significant amount of natural links to bring down the same anchor text ratio vs total external backlinks in the profile - do-able though if you subscribe to a few blogs and regularly comment to articles and maybe write some content for publication at toy (or other related) blogs - ensuring that you avoid blog rings/link networks/farms though.
-
In a situation like list, on a fairly new domain would it be quicker to start from scratch on a new domain?
-
View your link profile here.
Links are mostly coming from unauthoritative sources and mostly contain the same anchor text. This will be what you have to work on, start building natural links with varying anchor text to counterweight the poor link profile and history on your domain.
-
Sounds like you are an excellent candidate for some fun Memes attempting to gain socical traction!
-
Hi Rhys,
I agree with everything that Alan stated regarding existing links.
Moving forward, I'd suggest the following:
- Add the ability for customers to share your products socially. I don't see any social media icons on any of the pages, especially the product pages. Add FB, Twitter, Pinterest, Google Plus.
- Do you have social media accounts for your site? If not, create the 4 above and start posting! You'll get more of a sense of community and people will be able to share what puzzles they've completed, which ones they want to purchase next etc. I'm not personally in to puzzles but I know people that are, and they can't wait to get their next one as soon as they finish one.
- Highlight your competitive advantage more (on the item template, page titles etc). What makes you stand out? Free shipping? (BTW really really confusing having two free shipping points in dollars and pounds), best customer service, fast shipping, the latest puzzles etc.) Give people a reason to shop with you.
- You've got reviews but none of the products I viewed had any reviews. I'd suggest emailing customers 3-4 weeks after purchase asking for reviews if you don't already. This would also tie in nicely with a social media pages. Reviews are great for original content.
- Your blog has no entries and is dated from 2010? This doesn't look great...
- If you're struggling to get good/unique content on the site try adding more pictures/videos/staff testimonials/staff favourites etc.
Hope some of that helps
-
"When you factor in hundreds of links on every page" - I don't really see how I could reduce the amount of links on a page? As it's an eCommerce based website there nothing on there that I can see that would be helpful to remove?
"almost no depth of content" - Yeah, this is a problem we've run into. The problem is that a jigsaw puzzle of a cat, is exactly that. There's not much more you can add "content" wise. Even if you try and force extra content out, the most we can get is "this cat looks like he's relaxing in the garden shed."
"the ability to find products through several paths" - I don't think we can really change this, as the products really do fall under multiple categories. We've done Canacolization.
-
A quick review in Open Site Explorer shows that since you apparently don't have a huge volume of links, there's way too many coming from blatantly spam based domains: wywlinks.com, onelinkseo.com, contentrichdirectory.com, organisedlinks.com, yourlinkmarket.com, regularseo.com, elaboratedirectory.com, greatindexdirectory.com, linksmaximum.com, directorysuper.com, gatewayoflinks.com....
Even if you've cleared some of these out, the overall picture is that no great effort was put into obtaining high quality off-site signals- that it was an attempt to game the Google system. Since you say you've done what you could to remove links, it's possible that I'm looking at a "before" snapshot from within OSE, so I can't definitively say this is the issue, but it sure smells like it.
From there, when you factor in hundreds of links on every page, and almost no depth of content, the ability to find products through several paths (leading in duplication issues), the site gives the appearance of being "link polluted" both inbound and on-site.
So I'd say clear out all the links you can from directories. Dramatically reduce the on-site link structure, and if you want multiple paths to products, block some of those from indexing.
Then work to get more depth of descriptive text content on your category pages, and work to get high quality off-site recognition.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Website can't break into Google Top100 for main keywords, considering 301 Redirect to a new domain
A little background on our case. Our website, ex: http://ourwebsite.com was officially live in December 2015 but it wasn't On-Site optimized and we haven't done any Off-site SEO to it. In April we decided to do a small redesign and we did it an online development server. Unfortunately, the developers didn't disallow crawlers and the website got indexed while we were developing it on the development server. The development version that got indexed in Google was http://dev.web.com/ourwebsite We learned that it got indexed when we migrated the new redesigned website to the initial domain. When we did the migration we decided to add www and now it looks like: http://www.ourwebsite.com Meanwhile, we deleted the development version from the development server and submitted "Remove outdated content" from the development server's Search Console. This was back in early May. It took about 15-20 days for the development version to get de-indexed and around 30 days for the original website (http://www.ourwebsite.com) to get indexed. Since then we have started our SEO campaign with Press Releases, Outreach to bloggers for Guest and Sponsored Posts etc. The website currently has 55 Backlinks from 44 Referring domains (ahrefs: UR25, DR37) moz DA:6 PA:1 with various anchor text. We are tracking our main keywords and our brand keyword in the SERPs and for our brand keyword we are position #10 in Google, but for the rest of the main (money) keywords we are not in the Top 100 results in Google. It is very frustrating to see no movement in the rankings for the past couple of months and our bosses are demanding rankings and traffic. We are currently exploring the option of using another similar domain of ours and doing a complete 301 Redirect from the original http://www.ourwebsite.com to http://www.ournewebsite.com Does this sound like a good option to you? If we do the 301 Redirect, will the link-juice be passed from the backlinks that we already have from the referring domains to the new domain? Or because the site seems "stuck," would it not pass any power to the new domain? Also, please share any other suggestions that we might use to at least break into the Top 100 results in Google? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DanielGorsky0 -
Launching a new website. Old inherited site cannot be saved after lifted penalty. When should we kill the old site and how?
Background Information A website that we inherited was severely penalized and after the penalty was revoked the site still never resurfaced in rankings or traffic. Although a dramatic action, we have decided to launch a completely new version of the website. Everything will be new including the imagery, branding, content, domain name, hosting company, registrar account, google analytics account, etc. Our question is when do we pull the plug on the old site and how do we go about doing it? We had heard advice that we should make sure we run both sites at the same time for 3 months, then deindex the old site using a noindex meta robots tag.We are cautious because we don't want the old website to be associated in any way, shape or form with the new website. We will purposely not be 301 redirecting any URLs from the old website to the new. What would you do if you were in this situation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peteboyd0 -
April Google Update?
Since April 16 (when Jews ate Matzah) Google hurt one of our clients badly. They are well-known and beloved brand with hundreds of employees and locations across USA.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Elchanan
I can’t see any signal of organic update, or penalty (neither Google Places). No message on GWT Nothing has been changed on and off site. All keywords' ranking are looking like this All tools showing good analysis: MOZ, Barracuda, MajesticSeo Content is good and not duplicated, etc. Do one of you is aware of significant Google update?
What do you think/suggest?0 -
Google Manual Penalty - Unnatural Links FROM My Site - Where?
Hi Mozzers, I've just received a manual penalty for one of my websites. The penalty is for 'unnatural links from my site which I find disturbing because I can't see that anything really wrong with it. The website is www.lighting-tips.co.uk - its a pretty new blog (only 6-7 posts) and whilst I've allowed guest posting I'm being very careful that the content is relevant and good quality. I'm only allowing 1 - 2 links and very few with proper anchor text so I'm wondering what has been done so wrong that I'm getting this manual penalty? Am I missing something here? Thanks in advance. Aaron
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AaronGro0 -
Static links google guidelines
Google recommends to have static links it in guidelines Are breadcrumbs and static text link the same ? or in addition to breadcrumbs do I need static links on my page going from page A to B etc... The issue I have with static links this way is that if I look at the PR paper that would decrease the juice of my homepage ( which is the page I want to give the most juice to ) Thx,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Google Listings
How can i make my pages appear in google results such as menu, diner, hours, contact us etc.. when some searches for my keyword or domain take a look at this screen shot Thanks UbqY4kwA UbqY4kwA
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vlad_mezoz0 -
Is My site seeing a Google Dance ? - Rankings all over the place
My eCommerce website is seeing some rankings flucuate daily from say rank 20 to rank 130 whilst some other keywords ago up and down by as much as 40 places. I have been putting up alot of new unique content and can see in GWT that google has been crawling my site more but given that I was affected by the google panda updates which saw a 40% drop in traffic I'm only just to recover some of it., i have also been trying to get rid of any poor links and our linking building is only concentrating on high quality posts and links. I am wondering if this is the post panda update - "google dance" or is google having issues trying to work where to rank my site and possibly punish me? thanks Sarah.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SarahCollins0 -
Load balanced Site
Our client ecommerce site load from 3 different servers using load balancing. abc.com : IP: 222.222.222 Abc.com: IP: 111.111.111 For testing purpose 111.111.111 also point to beta.abc.com Now google crawling site beta.abc.com If we block beta.abc.com using robots.txt it will block google bot also , since beta.abc.com is really abc.com I know its confusing but I been trying to figure out. Ofcourse I can ask my dev to remove beta.abc.com make a seperate code and block it using .htaccess
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tpt.com0